The Man Behind The Masks
by LittleMissGeek8
Summary: For the first time, Deborah gets a chance to examine the masks on display in Tommy's room, and in the process discovers a bit more about Tommy's past. Takes place after part one of The Florence Nightingale Effect. One-shot. [Tommy Jarvis/Deborah Kim]


**The Man Behind the Masks**  
A Friday the 13th fanfic

 **Author's Note:** This story takes place after part 1 of The Florence Nightingale Effect.

The warm, golden tones of late afternoon had faded into the soft blues of evening outside Tommy Jarvis's cabin, but light still glowed in one upstairs room. Beside the small television across the room, the Nintendo Entertainment System sat abandoned. There was only so much Mario one could play in a day before growing tired of it. Tommy leaned back against a pile of pillows on his bed, his eyes half-closed, but not yet tired enough to sleep. The soft faint _clink_ of a glass being placed on the bedside table caught his attention, and he blinked a bit, opening his eyes as he did so.

Rousing himself enough to look at the person who had placed the glass there proved more difficult than he expected, and by the time he turned to look, she was no longer standing there. Instead, Deborah Kim was standing near the tables by the door of his room, quietly inspecting the series of latex masks that covered the surface. He expected her to speak or something, but all that came back to him was silence. Maybe she had thought he'd fallen asleep while she was refilling his glass. Softly Tommy cleared his throat, feeling slightly guilty when she jumped as if she expected to be scolded.

"Do you like them?" he asked, his soft voice raspy from his cold. Deborah turned to face him, her hands clasped over her stomach in that way he'd come to realize meant she was trying not to touch something.

"They're very impressive," she said, her eyes darting around and not meeting his face. Tommy exhaled softly in a not-quite sigh. It seemed like she still thought she'd done something wrong.

"Thanks." Tommy put a little extra effort in to make sure his lips formed an actual smile, despite how tired his illness had left him. "I'm glad you like 'em."

Deborah glanced back at them over her shoulder. "Did you make them yourself?" He waited until she looked back to shake his head.

"Only customized. I could probably make my own but…" He shrugged. "I don't know; time, money, effort? It's just a hobby really. Passes the time."

"It's a lot of work for just 'passing the time,' isn't it?" Deborah said over her shoulder. She'd bent down to look at the masks closer, twisting her clasped hands a bit. Tommy took a deep breath. The masks on that table were precious indeed; he'd always been selective about who he let touch them. Still..

"You can touch," he said softly, feeling his heart beat faster even as the words left his mouth. There was really no reason to be nervous about Deborah touching the masks, but somehow his body hadn't quite gotten the message from his brain. _She won't hurt anything_ , he told himself, but still the anxiety clung to his skin and wound its way around his heart.

Deborah looked back at him, then down at her hands, before looking back at his face with an inquisitive tilt to her eyebrows. Tommy nodded, hoping to get across the message that he wasn't joking about it. He saw her bite her lip before she turned and gingerly reached for one of the masks. It seemed to take a few seconds for her to be able to gather up the courage to touch, but finally her fingers landed on a rounded, grey mask with a faint alien-ness to the face.

Tommy swallowed. "Be gentle with that one, it's about ten years old." Deborah froze, the mask held in her hands as if it were made out of blown glass instead of latex. She blinked a few times, clearly doing mental calculations, her brows knitting up in concentration.

"Ten years… You were _eleven_ when you made this?"

" _Customized_ , but yeah something like that. Careful, the latex might be a bit fragile." His fingers itched to take it back, put it carefully back on its stand, but he didn't say anything. Besides, he could barely manage getting up to use the toilet at the moment, hanging around the table to do something so fiddly would be far too much strain. Deborah turned the mask over in her hands slowly, examining the care in the painted details.

"I can't believe you were _eleven_ when you did this," she murmured.

A small wry smile crossed his face. "Well, this might surprise you, but I wasn't exactly your typical eleven-year-old." Deborah looked up with a mock surprised expression.

"Nooo, who could have ever guessed that?" Tommy wrinkled his nose at her sarcasm, but it was a teasing gesture, not a malicious one. She moved to put the mask back on the stand, but Tommy reached out a hand and motioned her to bring it over. Deborah carefully walked over and set the mask in his outstretched hands before standing uncertainly beside him. Truthfully Tommy barely needed to look at the mask, he knew every fold of the rubber like it was part of his own body. His fingers curled around the opening for the wearer's neck and he felt some of the anxiety ebb.

"Why masks, though?" Deborah asked. "It's an… unusual hobby, isn't it?"

Tommy shrugged, staring ahead without really seeing anything. "It was cool?" The small chuckle he gave afterwards seemed to indicate his answer was a joke, but deep down he couldn't be sure. Thoughts swirled in his head as he turned his gaze to the mask in his hands, not really noticing or caring how long he stared. It was enough of a pause that he caught Deborah shifting her weight out of the corner of his eye, but any further words felt trapped in his throat.

Why _did_ he decide to make masks when he was so young? It was hard to recall. Like a face on the other side of a dirty window—so close, yet entirely unreachable and blurred by years of grime. When he finally moved, it was slowly and laboriously, tugging a sigh from his chest as he did so. Deborah had wandered back over to the table again.

"I didn't really have a lot of friends as a kid, you know," he said softly, not looking at her as if out of fear that his words would vanish again if he did. "Well, not really many my age, I guess. I hung around Trish and her friends when they were over, but that wasn't often."

Deborah turned to look at him, a touch of worry crossing her face. "I guess that was their loss then. You're _cool_ , Tommy. I mean, you're smart and creative and—"

"— _weird_." Tommy finished bluntly. He turned his gaze on her for a second before looking away again. "Kids are cruel. They see every abnormality, every weakness, every little social failure. And no, before you ask, nobody beat me up. I think I got into one or two fights when I was little but that wasn't really the same thing." He shrugged. "It was just… nothing. Spending lunch and recess and everything all by myself because I got branded _weird_ almost as soon as I started school. Any 'friends' I made didn't stick around long, or only spent time with me if their other friends were busy."

"And you figured the masks would make you cool." Deborah had walked back across the room and sat down beside him while he talked. He'd barely seen her move.

"Maybe." He squeezed his fingers lightly on the opening of the mask, his fingertips gliding along the smooth latex on the inside. "Maybe… I dunno, it felt nice to not have to be _me_ some days. I could come home and well, not have to wear my face for a while." Reluctantly he set the mask onto the blankets over his knees. A small, tight smile crossed his lips as he glanced over at Deborah. "Guess I've always been a bit crazy."

Deborah shook her head, leaning her weight onto her hands, clasped in her lap. "It's not crazy at all. A lot of people find that wearing a mask can let them do something they'd otherwise be scared to do. Like…" she trailed off, fishing for an example. "Like robbing a bank!" Almost immediately she grimaced, and Tommy's face took on a curious yet slightly repulsed expression. "Sorry, bad example. What about Halloween? It's really scary to knock on a stranger's door and ask for candy, but it's less so if you can pretend to be someone else."

Tommy gave a half-hearted shrug. "Yeah, I guess." Deborah's comment about people committing crimes in masks wouldn't leave his head. It was all he could do to force the image of a white hockey mask out of his head, and still it lurked in his subconscious. He could feel his heart beating faster despite his efforts, this time driven by different fears than before.

Beside him, Deborah kept talking, seemingly unaware of Tommy's distress. "They actually did some studies a while back about kids and Halloween candy, and the ones with a certain amount of anonymity, like say, a mask, were more likely to take more candy than others. It's part of de-individuation…"

" _Don't_." Tommy's voice was low, his hands balled into fists on top of the blanket, his knuckles starkly white as his nails dug into his palms. All at once Deborah realized what was going on, and her voice cut off abruptly. She leaned in, placing a hand on the blanket beside him.

"Tommy? Are you okay?" she asked, the worried tone in her voice sticking a needle of guilt into Tommy's gut. Deep down he hated worrying her like this, and yet it kept happening. "Was I analyzing you again by accident? I'll be more careful…"

Tommy shook his head sharply, feeling like the hockey mask in his mind was lurking just out of sight, and he was too tired to fight today. Even worse, the cold he was struggling with left his brain feeling foggy, causing every attempt to draw his mind onto something else to end in failure. Even sitting up felt like too much work all of a sudden, and he collapsed back onto the pillows behind him. Distress aggravated the eternal drizzle of mucus down his throat and sent him into a coughing fit, gasping red-faced for air with his eyes shut tight.

Then, he felt a cool, gentle hand come to rest overtop of his own. As the coughs subsided, he glanced hazily at Deborah next to him, crouched over his bed. "It wasn't the psych stuff at all, was it?" she asked softly. Tommy shook his head so slightly it was barely noticeable. Her other hand crept underneath his own, and the coolness of her hands was a welcome feeling compared to the elevated heat of his own. Somehow, focusing on her touch made it easier to think.

He stared at Deborah's face, not daring to speak after coughing like that, but thankfully he didn't need to. "You're not Jason," Deborah said gently. It was hard to know exactly what expression he was making with his thoughts all jumbled again, but it must have been one of surprise because she took notice. "I didn't read your mind, I just figured that must have been part of it. Tommy, you're not Jason; you're not like him and you never will be. You're _you_ , and I wouldn't have it any other way."

Slowly his hand closed over hers, squeezing gently as he gathered the strength to talk. "I don't know," he said, his voice raspy and soft, each word tickling his raw throat and threatening to send him coughing again. "What if I'm too close?" Deborah stroked the back of his hand with her thumb as she listened. "What if…"

" _'He who fights monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster_.' Is that what you mean?" Deborah asked. Despite the seriousness of her words, Tommy smiled. He should have counted on her to have some quote or other squirreled away for just such an occasion. If he was less tired and his throat less scratchy, he might have asked more about it, or gently teased her about knowing so many fitting quotes, but not today.

Instead, all he said was, " _Bookworm_ ," the single word softened by the affection in his voice and the tired smile on his face. Deborah, in return, stuck the very tip of her tongue out at him.

"I don't think you have too much to worry about with that, honestly," she continued, as if he'd never teased her at all. "You're at least aware that there's a risk, and you're getting help with it. And from everything I've heard, you've made a lot of progress. It's probably feeling a lot worse right now because you're tired from being sick, right?" Tommy nodded. Deborah stood, leaning over as she did so to press a soft kiss to the top of his head. "I've probably kept you up too long. You should sleep so you can get better."

Reluctantly she pulled her hands away from his and picked up the mask off his bed. "I'll put this back on the stand, okay?" Tommy knew he should tell her to clean it, since it was handled, but that would be too much explanation and honestly he was just too tired. He nodded. Cleaning would have to wait, and hopefully any oils wouldn't hurt it too badly in the meantime. Once the mask was carefully replaced on the Styrofoam wig stand, Deborah walked over to his bed again and placed a plastic bottle of painkillers on his bedside table.

"You should be ready for another dose in about two hours, so if you're still hurting or your fever's still bad, you should take some more. Stay hydrated, okay? And if you need anything you can call me."

Sleep tugged at Tommy's eyes but he managed to look up at her. "Sorry it wasn't a very good date," he said, his words slightly slurred from weariness.

"Nonsense," Deborah insisted with a smile. "C'mon, dinner? A… well, video games aren't _movies_ but it was entertainment at least?" She gestured towards his display of masks. " _And_ a museum? I don't think anyone could complain about that!" Despite the tickle in his throat, Tommy laughed. It was one way of looking at the evening, that's for sure.

Tommy reached out for her hand one last time before she left, and she took it with a soft squeeze. "I'll lock up on my way out; I think I remember where the spare key's at. Get some rest, okay?" She raised his hand to her lips, pressing a light kiss to the back of his hand before letting go, in lieu of a more "proper" goodbye kiss. Tommy didn't mind though; he'd rather not pass the germs that plagued him on to her too.

Deborah paused at the doorway to his room to say goodnight, but Tommy was asleep before she even closed the door, a faint smile on his face.


End file.
